Scenic route … Lisbon's waterside bike path is one of the case studies featured in the book Photograph: /Cycle Infrastructure/nai010

Bike lane builders rejoice! £1bn must be spent every year to make British roads more cycle-friendly, according to a cross-party report by MPs and peers published earlier this year. The Get Britain Cycling inquiry declared there must be “a fundamental cultural shift in how we think about the way we travel,” recommending setting targets for cycle use to rise from the current level of about 2% of all journeys to 25% by 2050. But, after more than 50 years of car-centric planning, what might this new bike-friendly urbanism look like?

But big plans are afoot. In March, chief promoter of novelty infrastructure projects, Boris Johnson, unveiled a £900m cycling vision for the capital. His ambitious plans include a 15-mile segregated east-west route across town – dubbed “Crossrail for the bike” – as well as a network of back-road “quietways” and a series of “mini Hollands” in the suburbs, where all journeys will be encouraged to be taken by bike.

It remains to be seen if this grandiose vision will ever materialise, but in his quest to follow the lead of the lowlands, a new book might come in handy. Cycle Infrastructure, written by the architects behind Dutch planning practice Artgineering, presents a survey of best-practice cycle routes from around the world, alongside interviews with the people that made them happen. There is also an enlightening section on innovations, from Copenhagen's conversation lanes, to the bike-friendly traffic lights in Groningen – which turn green for cyclists earlier when it's raining or snowing.

“The goal is to activate the full potential of cycling for the urban landscape,” say the authors, “and to consider cycling infrastructure as an integral design challenge instead of purely an issue of traffic engineering.”

In their survey, which travels from Vancouver's separated lanes to Lisbon's waterside route, via Cambridge, Vienna and Wuppertal, they ask how cycle highways might start to influence the fundamental ways we make our cities. “Will we begin to see new cycling-driven typologies,” they ask, “in the same way that the motorway led to the creation of the shopping mall?”

Their proposal for a “cyclist-friendly bio-mall”, designed to promote physical exercise, good nutrition and environmental consciousness, looks little more than a supermarket with lots of bike parking spaces, but there are plenty of intriguing inventions, as well as historical precedents – as shown in the examples below.

Ahead of its time by more than a century, the California Cycleway was an ambitious plan, dreamed up by wealthy American businessman Horace Dobbins, to build a 14km elevated bike route from Pasadena to Los Angeles. Conceived at the height of the cycling craze in the 1890s, 2km of the raised timber track was constructed – complete with electric lighting and stations for renting, storing and repairing bicycles at either end. Planned as a money-making enterprise, with a toll of 10 cents one-way or 15 cents for a round-trip with 100,000 projected annual users, it never turned a profit. Overtaken by the rise of the automobile, it was demolished in the early 20th-century – and ironically replaced by the the Pasadena Freeway.

When a traffic junction outside Eindhoven got too congested and dangerous for cyclists, the local authority took the radical move of lifting them off the ground altogether. The Hovenring is one of the most startling pieces of cycle infrastructure in the book, taking the form of a floating 70m-wide ring, suspended on tensile wires from a single pylon. Elevated embankments lead cyclists on to the hovering roundabout, which glows in a delicate halo above the junction by night.

The Dutch integration of cycling and public transport may seem like the ultimate ideal, but it has one ubiquitous side effect: the sprawling tangles of chains, spokes and handlebars that fill up every bit of public space near every train station in the country. In the small town of Alphen aan den Rijn, architect Wytze Patijn has come up with a novel solution, creating a home for almost 1,000 bikes in the form of a gigantic metal apple. Held aloft on a core of steel columns, its ramp is wrapped with a green space-frame, covered with mesh woven with butterfly patterns.

For haters of wind turbines, protesters against pylons and Nimby's who detest any visible sign of man's intervention on the landscape, this stealthy cycle path may be the answer. Inspired by the ha-has of the English landscape tradition, the invisible cycle path is a proposal by Artgineering to depress bike routes into the ground, hidden inside a trench. The depression hides the bike, but not the cyclist – giving the surreal impression of riders gliding miraculously across fields.